Relationships

While you can certainly advance your story completely on your own, it helps to have friends. Or enemies, or rivals, or whoever else! The people you meet along the way are just as important as the things that you do. The RELATIONSHIP command helps you keep track of people you know and charts your evolving story with them.

New Relationships

When you first meet someone you can assign a RELATIONSHIP TYPE and IMPRESSION based on how your character views that person after a first encounter. The type is just a short label that can be whatever you want, such as "Acquaintance", "Mysterious Stranger", "Best Friend", "Worst Enemy", "Spouse", or whatever else fits. The impression is a brief summary of how your character feels about the person, with maybe some details of the particular circumstances that led to these feelings.

Changing Relationships

Your perspective and opinions on the people you know may of course evolve over time, along with the exact nature of the relationship. That being the case, you can update your relationship with them at any time, changing either the type or the impression as needed.

If your relationship with a particular person ties into a personal story arc created through the STORY command, you can attach that relationship to the story in question as part of an update.

Earning Experience from Relationships

When you create a new or updated relationship impression you can receive a small amount of experience for it, up to once per person per day. But please keep in mind that you should only make an update when there has been a meaningful new episode or alteration in the relationship.

Usage

You can track your relationships through the RELATIONSHIP command, or by looking at your profile on the website.

• RELATIONSHIP
  
• RELATIONSHIP <person's name>
  
• RELATIONSHIP <person's name> * TYPE <new type text>
  
• RELATIONSHIP <person's name> * IMPRESSION <new impression text>

So, for example, Aleph the two-headed chimera meets Donna at the Seaglass Inn. This is the first time they meet.

Aleph may input...
> relationship Donna type Arch-Nemesis
> relationship Donna impression I hate her. She won't sell me seven hundred loaves of bread!

Then later, after some additional interactions, Aleph may want to edit its relationship with Donna.
> relationship Donna impression I hate her even more. She sided against me with a dumb guard!